What is it about?
This research addresses a key marketing issue for global organizations—whether to standardize user interfaces across international markets or whether to personalize user interfaces to specific markets.
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Why is it important?
Mass customization (MC) has become a global phenomenon with an increasing number of firms allowing consumers to customize products to their own needs, such as sneakers (e.g., Nike By You), sandwiches (e.g., Subway), and laptops (e.g., Lenovo). To leverage this trend efficiently, many companies have implemented identical MC interfaces around the globe. For example, the country-specific websites of car manufacturer Audi pursue the same configuration process across Europe, North America, and Asia. Prospective car buyers must first select a car model and then choose among a range of paints, followed by their preferred wheels and several interior features. The piecemeal presentation of product attributes shifts consumers’ focus from the overall product to individual attributes. We argue that the current approach to MC is suboptimal. Whereas by-attribute interfaces correspond to the processing style of Western consumers who process information in an isolated and more analytic way, these interfaces are at odds with the processing style of Asian consumers who process information in a contextualized and more holistic way. We draw from cross-cultural research, consumer research, and research on human-computer interaction to argue that matching the MC interface to consumers’ culture-specific processing style—that is, a “processing-congruent interface”—is more effective. A series of six studies shows that processing-congruent interfaces lead to a greater subjective experience of ease when using the interface, which in turn generates positive consumer responses such as enhanced product satisfaction and higher purchase likelihood. We demonstrate the practical relevance of these effects in large-scale field studies: One study found that international visitors spent a higher amount of money for their configured chocolate if they used a processing-congruent interface. Another study on 200,000 Facebook users showed that processing-congruent interfaces led to improved click-through rates for advertisements of 40%. Conceptually, the findings provide a novel look at the link between customization and personalization, two one-to-one marketing concepts that aim to achieve the same goal: an experience tailored to consumers. Whereas customization achieves this goal by having consumers explicitly state their preferences, personalization does so by leveraging existing customer profile data. The current research provides the first set of systematic studies pointing at the large potential of what one might call “personalized customization,” whereby not only the product but also the customization experience is tailored to consumers. Managerially, we address a key marketing issue for global organizations—whether to standardize MC interfaces across international markets or whether to personalize MC interfaces to specific markets. The findings suggest that failing to adjust MC interfaces to markets can cause a series of negative consumer responses from reduced product satisfaction to lower conversion. In fact, our research indicates that many companies currently seem to use a suboptimal MC interface in Asia, with conversion rates that are only half the level of those in the West. This is a serious business drawback. In sum, we advise firms to personalize the customization experience by employing processing-congruent interfaces across markets. These strategies do not require complex changes in technological infrastructure or alterations in the use of marketing tools. All they require is a simple rearrangement of the MC presentation format across markets.
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This page is a summary of: Personalizing the Customization Experience: A Matching Theory of Mass Customization Interfaces and Cultural Information Processing, Journal of Marketing Research, October 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0022243719867698.
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